Gaming

Today was another typical British summers day (rain), so I decided to pick up Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon and it has impressed me.

I am always iffy about letting my son play games for some reason, partially due to the views of other parents I am around and how poorly they look at video games. Today I thought “screw it”. I personally see nothing wrong with them, as long as they are age appropriate.

I picked up Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon which is the first point and click adventure game my son has ever played. Initially I though the interface would be confusing, but much to my surprise it’s actually relatively simple even for a young child's mind to grasp.

It's a sweet and simple little point & click game where you play as a car called Putt-Putt and you accidentally have a trip into space. It has some really fun activities for kids clicking on random objects and seeing what happens, small puzzles like a maze to find your way through and so on. Watching my son quickly pick up how to navigate the maze by pointing the cursor in different directions was incredible.

I’ve spent a few days adding support for upgrading the firmware of the various wireless 8Bitdo controllers into fwupd. In my opinion, the 8Bitdo hardware is very well made and reasonably priced, and also really good retro fun.

The developer of ChromaGun sent in a copy of the game for me to test out and while I found the idea rather cool, shooting paint around to solve puzzles it does have major issues on Linux.

I tried the game on last weeks livestream and while it was quite interesting to play, it repeatedly crashed to the desktop in a short amount of time. I waited a week after emailing the developer these issues to post this up, but after no reply sadly this is just how the game is.

Okhlos is another new released that was provided to me by GOG, I tried it properly tonight during the livestream and sadly it isn't all that good. It wasn't my first time playing it, as the developer sent me an early copy a while ago which I remember well.

Essentially, you're in control of a mob in ancient Greece with a twin-stick shooter feel to it. You control a single character with the WASD keys and the mob with the mouse. You're able to recruit new members automatically by rolling your mob through them, and hold the left mouse button on enemies to watch hell unfold as your mob takes them down.

Facebook is starting to take gaming far more seriously. Not content with funneling the likes of Candy Crush through its servers, the social network is now joining forces with the company behind the Unity game engine to create its own desktop gaming platform.

Via multi-threading improvements to the game engine, Xenko is seeing a huge performance win with the Vulkan API.

Xenko 1.7β added Vulkan support and with multi-threading work that's ongoing, they've scored a big performance win. Their Vulkan performance with the Xenko Game Engine is around 6x faster with multi-threading compared to 3x with Direct3D and OpenGL.

Valve has released a new Steam Client stable update for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, bringing lots of improvements and many bugfixes.

The August 16 Steam Client update is a major one, and among the new features and enhancements implemented, we can mention the ability of handling clickable URLs in the chat windows for the desktop Steam Client running on GNU/Linux distros, and better compatibility with the soon-to-be-released macOS 10.12 Sierra operating system.

Thus there are some Dota 2 OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on the Intel Mesa driver below. But no results to share today for The Talos Principle. The Talos Principle menus were no longer rendering far of course as they had been up until at least one month ago, but the in-game benchmark mode was really choppy even with the "lowest" settings. When increasing the settings and restarting the game, the visuals still looked different from their renderings with OpenGL, so this game was omitted from testing today.

Lucius Demake, as its name indicates, is a demake of the original Lucius, a survival horror game inspired by the masterpiece horror film The Omen (1976). The premise of the game is to control Lucius, a six year old incarnation of the Antichrist, in his crusade of terror and chaos through his house, murdering all the residents one by one.

Responding to a critical need for skilled technology and knowledge workers, the State of West Virginia recently established its first ever coding, app, and game design curriculum for its schools. Starting in the upcoming school year, students will be able to learn the skills required to design, implement, and release their own games, and open source will be pivotal to their development and future.

Planet Nomads looks like the survival game to really get me interested in the genre, the developers emailed in to let me know that the game is coming to Linux and will release in alpha form this month on the 25th of August.

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